julie benbassat

reflections on three years passed

As my final year gets into gear, I have been pulled into a sense of nostalgia for the last three years. It’s true I have a quarter of my time here at Brown left to go, but it feels like this year is going faster than the previous three, and I don’t quite know how…

conquering the final frontier of French pastry

I grew up in Tunisia as a transplant from India. I don’t know if it was the flaky desert soil, the Mediterranean breeze, or the legacy of Hannibal towering above me on Carthage Hill, but I matured with a conqueror’s spirit. Unlike Hannibal, however, I conquered lands not with elephants but through food: Brownies were…

the double standard of communication and connection

Living in this era where technological innovations enable nearly constant, instantaneous communication is a blessing and a curse. On one hand, we have the unprecedented ability to connect with our friends and family the very instant the desire to do so strikes us. A quick text, a couple buttons pushed to place a call, a…

how wwoofing gave me a new life philosophy

Summer in Japan is a visceral experience. The air is always thick with an inundative, omnipresent humidity and cicadas chatter constantly in the background, their rhythmic song swelling in gentle crescendos and decrescendos. I remember noticing these details the first night I arrived in Hino, Japan. This quiet suburban town, partitioned by the criss-crossing veins…

a review of HBO’s The Night Of

There is a moment in the first episode of the HBO miniseries The Night Of when detective Dennis Box drives up to the crime scene in the dead of night. An accused murderer is waiting anxiously in the back of a squad car and a worried neighbor in a robe is sitting outside the victim’s…